


Landlocked country

by Anonymous



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 04:18:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13942446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: One day--he must have been five or six--his father pulled him out of school to go to some conference at a college in San Francisco.





	Landlocked country

One day--he must have been five or six--his father pulled him out of school to go to some conference at a college in San Francisco. One of the professors there knew his mother or something--the explanation didn't stick with him. 

What did stick with him was that they must have gotten on the wrong train, or the signs on it must have been wrong, because instead of a college they ended up at the beach. It was March, cold but clear, and his dad looked around, frustrated. This was before cellphones, before you could say, _Siri, where the fuck am I, and how do I get to where I'm supposed to be?_

Erik really wasn't bothered by it--they were by the beach! And then he spotted the zoo, and his dad must have given up on ever getting to that conference, 'cause he bought a couple of tickets and they wandered around, looking at the animals and eating ice cream sandwiches. Erik had mostly only seen wild animals on TV, in movies, and he was fascinated with them all, the sleek but awkward bodies of the penguins, the stripes of the tigers, the endless heights of the giraffes, the lions' manes and the elephants' tusks. Every time they came to an exhibit with a little picture of the African continent on its sign, he asked his dad if he got to see those animals up close, in Wakanda.

His dad laughed indulgently, but it wasn't until they were out of the zoo, walking along Ocean Beach, that he told Erik about the antelope herds, and about the war rhinos. He described the war rhinos in great detail, and also the flocks of different birds, the lithe deer and a number of different animals that, from what Erik would later remember, were like cows but not actually cows. He talked about Wakanda at length, the fabled country of his birth that Erik had never been to, that N'Jobu had never agreed to bring Erik back to, not even for a vacation. When he was a little older, Erik realized that the reason they didn't go was that they couldn't afford the trip, the time off, and that the stories were his dad's way of taking him there. 

He didn't mind. He had the whole day with his dad, on the beach, as they talked and walked and talked. And even ran, a little. They're both suited up for the conference so they must have looked like a pair of crazy missionaries, but Erik didn't mind that either. Erik loved the beach: the long open stretches, the grassy dunes separating it from the road, the Pacific Ocean that was the biggest, most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. They watched the sun set, shimmering red and orange and pink against the water, and the smudges of blue-gray clouds against the yellowing edge of the world. 

His father told him about the sunsets in Wakanda, which were the most beautiful in the world.

"More beautiful than this?" Erik asked.

For a second his dad looked very sad, and it was a while before he said, looking up at the empty sky, "You'll see."

In Oakland it was the bay, the bridge, the port: a part of his home as much as the basketball court or the art on the walls of their apartment. As familiar as the broken elevator in their building, the garish green house on the end of the block, where an old woman with too many dogs lived. The dogs barked and howled like a horror movie, but he'd met them and they were sweet. They licked his hands and nuzzled up to him, their tails whipping each other's sides. The old lady once told him to enjoy it while he could: they were fine with boys, but they didn't like men. 

He never got the chance the find out.

His first foster home was in a depression next to the freeway. There was grass but nobody played on it. Like every other house he would live in before he graduated, he couldn't see the bay from it. The second was on a street that might as well have been a freeway, people drove so fast down it, and all the house's west-facing windows were boarded up. ("This used to be a good neighborhood," his foster mother said, looking pointedly at him. Yeah, well, fuck her too.) They still hadn't been repaired when he left. There was another on the edge of the lake, a body of water that struck Erik as too gray and placid to even consider. There was another in Pill Hill. The neighborhood was nice. The family wasn't.

He was in high school by then. Some days after class he'd grab his backpack, hop on BART, take a bus out to Lands End and do his homework there until the sun set. Sometimes he thought about his daddy in those moments, how he died so far away from home, how he never got to see the sun set in Wakanda again. Sometimes he thought about his other ancestors, his mom's side of the family. About the Middle Passage, the captives who jumped into the Atlantic Ocean rather than be slaves. 

He thought he could understand them, but it was different out here: the ocean still represented an escape, but to him, the Pacific glowing for miles on end, the boundless horizon, offered boundless possibilities. It was beautiful, it was powerful, it whispered to him that he could go anywhere, he could do anything. He had a plan already, but couldn't help thinking about what his plan might have been if his dad had lived. Probably would have stayed in California, gone to college local instead of taking what he could from the military. Maybe he and his dad would even have made it back to Wakanda, and N'Jobu would have owned up that all the fairy tales about a magic metal and war rhinos he'd told were just fairy tales, and Erik would tell him that he knew, and he didn't care, as long as they got to watch the sun set together. If he'd still had his dad, Erik would have forgiven him anything.

He'd also rather be writing this essay about Babo than that weak-assed Bartleby, but that wasn't how the world worked. He blinked at the disappearing sun, the shining ocean, wiped the tears from his face, and headed back to the place he had to call home.


End file.
